The Jordan Rules (31 page)

There's an informal rule among those close to the NBA: To ascertain the quality of a game, add up the numbers on the backs of the officials. If the three total less than 100, it should be a well-officiated game. If the total is between 100 and 120, there could be problems of consistency. Over 120? Tell your team to foul every time because no one knows what will happen. The numbers for Hollins, Crawford, and Bernhardt are 42, 43, and 63. Ugh, 148! This was a disaster waiting to happen.

The Bulls started to leave the court. “I was always told to take your team off the court,” explained Jackson, “because they're reluctant to bring you back.”

But there was no hesitation from Crawford. Replays were inconclusive, although it appeared Brickowski had a toe on the three-point stripe, which would negate the extra point and end the game. The Bucks, though, claimed they had a replay that showed Brickowski's foot behind the line. Referees are not permitted to speak to reporters after games in the NBA, but it was clear what Crawford was telling Bernhardt: His foot was on the line. Bernhardt had been just two feet away, but he backed off and it was a two-pointer. The game was over. Bucks coach Del Harris went berserk. He'd lost almost every way imaginable to the Bulls, but this one was unimaginable: A guy who'd made one three-pointer in his career hits one and it gets waved off to prevent overtime.

Charlotte on March 15 proved stubborn, but the 105–92 win was inevitable as Jordan put on a show for the folks back in North Carolina yet again with 34 points. The Bulls moved on to Cleveland, where the Cavaliers led by 11 shortly after halftime, but the Bulls hung a 23–6 spurt in eight minutes to take control of the game and win 102–98.

“Another brick in the wall,” Jim Cleamons said afterward—it was becoming a regular postgame comment for the young assistant coach. Bach was more direct: After a win, he'd draw an ace of spades on the blackboard. It was the military sign of death; soldiers would leave one between the toes of a fallen enemy in battle. Another one bites the dust. Aces of spades were turning up everywhere the Bulls went.

Despite the Bulls' gaudy record, respect was hard to come by. Opposing players and coaches doubted the Bulls' chances all season, even after losing to them by 20 and 30 points. Reggie Miller's comments after the Pacers' win in Indianapolis were typical: “We're just as good as they are. Take Michael Jordan off that team and who the hell do they have? Who the hell do they have over there? Nobody.”

Pooh Richardson echoed that after the Timberwolves game, saying the Bulls were no better than a half-dozen teams in the West. A few days later, after the Hawks defeated Boston, Glenn “Doc” Rivers would say that while the Bulls had the best record, the Celtics were the best team. And Milwaukee assistant coach Mack Calvin said after that controversial ending March 13 that the Bulls would not win the East because they didn't shoot free throws well enough. Cleveland coach Lenny Wilkens added that he thought with McHale and Bird healthy the Celtics would defeat the Bulls.

The Bulls were battling a lot of resentment. Earlier in the season, it was suggested that they were winning because of injuries to all the other teams. “We get good and now the league's bad, right?” Jordan protested one day. “Well, there are some great teams in the league and we're one of them.”

There were some very good reasons for the team's success, especially the defense, like the terrorizing fireman's drill the Bulls had become adept at. Jackson, who pieced it together from the teachings of Bill Fitch, Red Holzman, and Hubie Brown, is a great teacher, and the Bulls worked on it in almost every practice. Four players go against four, with four waiting on defense up the court each time to pick up the players who have penetrated the first group. It's a scramble to get to the basket, and players learn about fighting pressure, but even more about playing midcourt defense. And midcourt is where the Bulls beat teams. The area from the free-throw line to midcourt is where plays begin, and that's where the Bulls take teams out of their offense, often turning the mistakes into transition slam dunks by Pippen, Jordan, or Grant. Grant's speed allows him to double and then retreat to his man, and Jordan and Pippen are the riverboat gamblers of the NBA, sharp dudes who will steal your underwear off you, but carefully. Jordan gambles in games the way he gambles off the court—on everything—and Pippen, though more conservative off the court, has a mean streak in him and likes the challenge of the chase. Together, they look like an octopus coming at a ball handler. And Cartwright is inside, if not to block any shots, then to create fear and loathing with his flailing elbows and bruising body, while Paxson is deadly spotting up for his shot. And while there seemed to be resentment of the Bulls around the Eastern Conference, some of the players saw something else.

“Teams are quitting on us, they're afraid,” Cartwright noted after the Cleveland game. “You can see it in their eyes. They made a run and they quit. They were satisfied to do that. They don't think they can beat us. We haven't been playing that well, but these teams are scared. It's like when teams used to play the Celtics.”

Mack Calvin was right. The Bulls are not a good free-throw-shooting team. The entire front line was averaging less than 70 percent from the free-throw line. In comparison, no one on the entire Celtics team shot less than 76 percent from the free-throw line. Jackson knew the Bulls were not a good free-throw-shooting team. “Bad mechanics,” he explained. He had set a preseason team goal of 78 percent, but had lowered that to 75 percent, and the Bulls had just reached that level. But Reinsdorf had watched that Bucks game on TV from Florida and seen the Bulls miss 7 free throws in 23 attempts, 70 percent for the game. Reinsdorf couldn't understand how the Bulls could shoot better than 50 percent from the field and not much better than that from the free-throw line. He'd called Jackson again and wondered.

Jackson knew full well the team's free-throw-shooting problems were due in large part to the poor form of Pippen, who was not a good outside shooter, either, but had a good shooting percentage because he dunked so often, as did Grant, although Grant was a better straight-on shooter from fifteen feet. Also, Jackson knew that Cartwright, a 79 percent career free-throw shooter, didn't get many shooting opportunities in the Bulls' offense, so it was hard for him to be in rhythm when he did get to the free-throw line.

“But short guys don't understand this,” Jackson explained about Reinsdorf. “They can't understand how guys cannot make free throws. That's because they had to make free throws to play. Otherwise, they wouldn't get in the game. If they couldn't make 'em, they'd be sitting at home. It's not that way with the big guys. They played no matter how they shot and nobody worried about the free throws.”

Until they became pros, that is, and small guys paid their salaries.

Wilt Chamberlain, of course, had problems at the foul line. The great scoring machine of NBA history was a 51 percent career free-throw shooter. He never liked to talk about his free-throw shooting because it was a failure and the big menacing Wilt wouldn't hear of such things. He was an angry giant when he played. Once asked by a fan, “How's the weather up there?” Chamberlain said, “It's raining,” and then he spit on him. But the week of the Bulls-Hornets game, Chamberlain had finally agreed to have his number retired in Philadelphia. And he was feeling self-deprecating, a posture unfamiliar to many who knew Wilt, who was living mostly in record books these days. “I went to a psychiatrist once about my free-throw shooting,” Chamberlain deadpanned to reporters. “After six months I was still all screwed up, but the psychiatrist could make ten of ten.”

Jackson wasn't aware of Chamberlain's little joke, but he wasn't joking when he went to Grant, Pippen, and King and asked them all to begin seeing a psychologist. He felt all had poor concentration on the court, and he'd made appointments for each one.

“He's the one who's got to be nuts,” Grant later said as he and Pippen canceled their appointments. King simply didn't show.

On March 18, after a slow start, the Bulls ran away from Denver in the third quarter to a 13-point win in which Jackson got some substantial bench production, particularly from Will Perdue. Perdue was now something of a folk hero to the Stadium crowd, sort of a pet they wildly applauded every time he came into the game. It was a kind of derisive applause, much like that reserved for Harthorne Nathaniel Wingo in Madison Square Garden in the 1970s. Perdue was a clumsy white man who was not a total bumbler after all. He still played mechanically, thinking about shots before taking them, so he got few. But under Vermeil's program he'd gained strength, and with that confidence he could now rebound without bending his knees to jump. His jump with his arms up was stronger, and he had become a really useful rebounding engine. His hands and feet would never be quick and his defense was still poor; opponents attacked the lane when he was in the game. But he could help, though not yet as much as Cartwright and perhaps not ever. Cartwright didn't look pretty playing, but no one liked to drive into the paint against Cartwright. If he could knock out Akeem Olajuwon for two months, what might he do with some 6-3 guard? In practice, the players yelled “Incoming” or “Scud missile attack” when Cartwright started winging his elbows as he revved up for a drive to the basket. “Get those Scuds away from me,” Pippen would taunt Cartwright in the locker room in the Stadium, where Cartwright sat next to Pippen. Even the best centers, like Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, routinely were held under their scoring average by Cartwright.

The Bulls pounced on Atlanta again on March 20 and won by 22. It was their fiftieth win—they'd won fifty faster than any team in franchise history—and they had gone 18–1 since the All-Star break. The Hawks were starting to slip now, but many felt Bob Weiss should be Coach of the Year. “For a team that would rather pass a stone than the ball, it's amazing the way they've been playing,” he joked. For the first time in years they had been playing basketball instead of 'Nique ball when Dominique Wilkins had the ball, and Doc ball when Glenn Rivers had the ball, and Mo ball when Moses Malone had the ball and so on.

Cliff Levingston had another good game against the Hawks. He'd had few good efforts this season, mostly because he simply could not figure out the Bulls' offense and Jackson was afraid to leave him on the court. But he could be active on the boards—scrumming up the game, Jackson liked to call it—and he scored 12 points against the Hawks. Levingston was desperately disliked by some of the Hawks, and during the game Levingston took down John Battle hard on a drive to the basket. With just a few seconds left and the Hawks trailing by 24, the Hawks were yelling for Weiss to call a time-out. They wanted to run a play so they could try to get Levingston. Weiss said there'd be another time.

Earlier, another little drama played itself out at courtside. Kevin Loughery, the Bulls coach when Reinsdorf purchased the team, was now a Hawks assistant. He was sitting on the Hawks' bench when Krause walked by. Krause usually sits there before the game to watch the Bulls players shooting, but when he saw Loughery he kept going without a word.

“I knew I was fired the day he got the job,” Loughery recalled. “I knew all about Jerry Krause and he knew that I knew, so he couldn't have me around.”

Loughery didn't have much success with the Bulls and was never considered a great tactician, but he remained bitter nevertheless.

“You see,” Loughery was telling a reporter, “I was in Baltimore [as a high-scoring guard] way back when Jerry Krause was there and I knew he had nothing to do with signing Wes Unseld and Earl Monroe and all these guys he takes credit for discovering. And he knows I know and that he couldn't con me. He was just a gofer.”

“Me and Murph haven't talked in years,” Krause said to the reporter after he'd left Loughery. “Some guys never forget. He have anything to say?”

A disturbing pattern was developing for the Bulls as they went into Philadelphia and had their nine-game winning streak broken March 22. Jackson had begun to rely less and less on the bench players in important games. Only Perdue and Armstrong were getting any significant playing time, and Grant was feeling the fatigue as he went forty-two minutes and grabbed 10 rebounds, but slowed at the end as Charles Barkley climbed all over the Bulls and Philadelphia ran off a closing 15–4 streak to win 95–90. Jordan hit just 8 of 23 shots, and even though the rest of the starters combined to shoot 58 percent, it was hard to overcome a poor Jordan shooting game. In the team's other loss in March—to the Pacers—Jordan had also shot 8 of 23. Pippen tried to be diplomatic in his postgame comments. “They forced Michael into taking some shots he doesn't normally take,” said Pippen about Jordan missing 3 of his last 4 shots against double- and triple-teams. Despite that, Jordan had attempted 4 of the Bulls' last 6 shots.

Grant, 8 of 10 from the field, had hit his only 2 fourth-quarter attempts and was exasperated. Cartwright, 5 for 9, hadn't gotten a shot in the fourth quarter; neither had Paxson. They'd seen it before. “If Michael had just shot .500, well… ,” observed Paxson. The victories were almost shrugged off while the losses gnawed and rankled.

Jackson had played all twelve players for some time to try to keep harmony and find a rotation. It hadn't worked and the starters were now being stretched, including Cartwright, who could least afford it. Jackson was worried about him breaking down since he'd had trouble with his hip and calf. Cartwright told friends he was feeling tired, but he wouldn't tell Jackson. Jackson talked to him about sitting out a week in April if the races were decided to rest for the playoffs, but Cartwright didn't like the idea. He felt that for the sake of his timing and game conditioning he needed to play. And, in any case, he felt he needed to be more involved in the offense as playoffs approached, not less. Jackson said they would talk about it again.